Books of The Times; Why Updike Writes and What He Writes About

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: March 9, 1989

Self-Consciousness By John Updike 257 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.

What of his life is there left for John Updike to recall in these memoirs, after so much has gone into his other books: 36 of them before this one -poems, novels, short stories, essays and criticism, children's stories and a play - appearing like clockwork almost yearly for more than three decades now?

A dumb question, of course, because writers draw on imagination, not the facts (if there are facts even). Still, one persists in approaching memoirs like ''Self-Consciousness'' wondering what more there is for the author to say.

Not surprisingly, considering Mr. Updike's prolific articulateness, there is a great deal more. Perhaps because he believes that ''most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer,'' he begins by going to the source of his own early impressions.

In ''A Soft Spring Night in Shillington'' - the first of the six essays that make up these memoirs - he returns in 1980 to the town in southeastern Pennsylvania where he spent his earliest childhood, and discovers, walking through its streets, that the past cannot after all be recaptured. ''Shillington, its idle alleys and darkened foursquare houses, had been my idea.'' The idea had been stronger than the reality.

Still, there are ways to approach the reality. One of them for Mr. Updike is to identify the connections between his fiction and his idea. Throughout these pages, whenever his memories suggest a passage in his work, he will footnote the memory and quote the passage. It's not that he's showing how closely his art has followed his life. It's the other way around, one suspects; he's trying to detach his life from his art.

Another of his approaches to reality is to explore the reason he became a writer. It's not surprising to discover that his mother was a frustrated novelist, or that a high-school teacher memorably complimented his sense of composition. Yet in a wholly remarkable statement in his second essay, ''At War With My Skin,'' he attributes everything courageous and original he has done in his life - including his aim to become ''a craftsman of some sort, closeted and unseen'' - to his hereditary affliction of psoriasis, which he defines as ''a metabolic disorder that causes the epidermis, which normally replaces itself at a gradual, unnoticeable rate, to speed up the process markedly and to produce excess skin cells.''

You don't take this assertion literally, of course. But he's more serious than he at first appears, and you realize so when he affectingly writes about certain other disorders that have plagued him intermittently over the years - particularly stuttering, choking, asthma and claustrophobia.

Mr. Updike's sense of self is precarious, it becomes clear, particularly insofar as he associates it with his oral passages and his skin. Messages written on paper would seem to be an ideal form of compensation. A reader of ''Self-Consciousness'' begins to see Mr. Updike's artistic development as the marriage of sickness and creativity, as well as the triumph of self-discipline over neurosis, that Thomas Mann both portrayed and fulfilled in his ideal of the bourgeois artist.

Though Mr. Updike doesn't tell his story in such terms, he describes his development with his typical combination of delicacy and concreteness. He insists on his middle-class background, buttressing his case with a passionate yet self-searching elaboration of his controversial stand in favor of America's mission in Vietnam (''On Not Being a Dove''). Yet he admits that for all his rootedness in middle-American soil, he always sensed that he was supposed to transcend his beloved Shillington. ''The assumption was in the air, like the high humidity and the eye-irritating pollen, that I should get out.''

Retracing the path of his escape he responds to those critics who have claimed, particularly of his first books, that, as he puts it, ''I wrote all too well but had nothing to say: I, who seemed to myself full of things to say, who had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say. . . .''

He reasserts his belief in God, if only because among ''the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.'' He explains what has been called his shocking frankness: ''What small faith I have has given me what artistic courage I have. My theory was that God already knows everything and cannot be shocked. And only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon.''

He baits his feminist critics, by perversely - and, one suspects, intentionally - implying that it is primarily female writers who recall ''the period of protests and marches'' of the 1960's ''as a wonderful time.'' ''Fists uplifted,'' he concludes after quoting a series of fictional descriptions of anti-war demonstrations written by Barbara Raskin, Alice Adams and Diane Johnson, ''women enter history. The clitoral at last rebels against the phallic.'' But it isn't only women who have recalled the 1960's as ''a wonderful time.'' Why treat the anti-war movement as if it had been led by feminists?

Yet at the end of ''Self-Consciousness,'' none of Mr. Updike's puzzles are solved. In ''On Being a Self Forever,'' he betrays as great a panic over the idea of extinction as he did in his earliest writing. He probes his precarious ideas of immortality and hopes that as his head grows ''full of holes where once there was electricity and matter'' he will feel no ''more pain of loss than I do now.''

But you sense that for him the only verity remains what it always has been: writing is all. Whatever the threat to his voice, his skin, or his self: ''To be in print was to be saved. And to this moment a day when I have produced nothing printable, when I have not gotten any words out, is a day lost and damned as I feel it.''

Only through writing could his self achieve consciousness. Advance Publicationsd(Knopf)